The EMSO Generic Instrument Module (EGIM): Standardized and Interoperable Instrumentation for Ocean Observation

Abstract

The oceans are a fundamental source for climate balance, sustainability of resources and life on Earth, therefore society has a strong and pressing interest in maintaining and, where possible, restoring the health of the marine ecosystems. Effective, integrated ocean observation is key to suggesting actions to reduce anthropogenic impact from coastal to deep-sea environments and address the main challenges of the 21st century, which are summarized in the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Blue Growth strategies. The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory (EMSO), is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), with the aim of providing long-term observations via fixed-point ocean observatories in key environmental locations across European seas from the Arctic to the Black Sea. These may be supported by ship-based observations and autonomous systems such as gliders. In this paper, we present the EMSO Generic Instrument Module (EGIM), a deployment ready multi-sensor instrumentation module, designed to measure physical, biogeochemical, biological and ecosystem variables consistently, in a range of marine environments, over long periods of time. Here, we describe the system, features, configuration, operation and data management. We demonstrate, through a series of coastal and oceanic pilot experiments that the EGIM is a valuable standard ocean observation module, which can significantly improve the capacity of existing ocean observatories and provides the basis for new observatories. The diverse examples of use included the monitoring of fish activity response upon oceanographic variability, hydrothermal vent fluids and particle dispersion, passive acoustic monitoring of marine mammals and time series of environmental variation in the water column. With the EGIM available to all the EMSO Regional Facilities, EMSO will be reaching a milestone in standardization and interoperability, marking a key capability advancement in addressing issues of sustainability in resource and habitat management of the oceans.

A Deep-Learning Based Pipeline for Estimating the Abundance and Size of Aquatic Organisms in an Unconstrained Underwater Environment from Continuously Captured Stereo Video

“…There is a growing need for long-term ocean observation, as coastal and deep ocean observatories are key to improving the understanding of the underlying processes within the marine ecosystem [ 70 ]. This is the reason why different European initiatives have promoted their use through investments in infrastructure development and dedicated scientific sessions on how to coordinate ocean data acquisition, analysis and dissemination, e.g., JERICO S3 (Joint European Research Infrastructure of Coastal Observatories: Science, Service, Sustainability).…”

Integrating Multidisciplinary Observations in Vent Environments (IMOVE): Decadal Progress in Deep-Sea Observatories at Hydrothermal Vents

“…The first node, SeaMoN west, is deployed at a former lava lake that formed within a series of rifted volcanic cones at the summit of the central volcano (e.g., Ondreás et al, 2009;Escartı ́n et al, 2014). This node measures seafloor seismic activity, vertical seafloor motion, and is presently also equipped with the multisensor platform EGIM (EMSO Generic Instrumentation Module) that comprises a turbidimeter, a CTD, an ADCP, one hydrophone, an Oxygen optode, and a pressure gauge (Lanteŕi et al, 2022). The SeaMoN East node is deployed at the base of the Tour Eiffel active hydrothermal edifice and is dedicated to physical, chemical and ecological studies.…”

“…Although basic, this type of data is not routinely acquired today at all sites. EMSO developed, in the framework of the European Commission H2020 EMSODev project (Grant Agreement 676555), the EGIM, designed to continuously measure long-term series of key variables (Lanteŕi et al, 2022). EGIM is originally equipped with a CTD, ADCP, oxygen sensor, pressure temperature, turbidity meter and hydrophone to measure conductivity, precise pressure, dissolved O 2 , turbidity, passive acoustics, and ocean currents but can host additional sensors.…”

“…Groundtruthing measurements and sampling should be performed whenever possible and at every maintenance cruise. This includes oxygen calibration with Winkler measurements, characterizing seawater particulate load by sampling bottom water, in situ temperature (Lanteŕi et al, 2022), or equivalent, to monitor key regional water mass characteristics at each site • Sample bottom and full water column seawater to conduct ground truthing chemical measurements and enable sensor calibration • Install cabled, instrumented profiling moorings for full water column measurements 2. Subsurface processes…”

Technologically-sustained ecological monitoring of a coastal fish community with a highly integrated biological and environmental data

“…Various devices were tested and experiments performed at the OBSEA. The most important case was represented by the EMSO Generic Instrument Module (EGIM) as a multiparametric probe module that could be equipped with cameras in the future [58]. The observatory was also used to carry out an experiment on movements of crustacean decapods fishery resources such as Palinurus mauritanicus and Maja squinado using acoustic tracking [59].…”